âWe see the world through British eyesâ stated Gibraltarâs chief minister in a BBC interview on the March 8, 2018 (BBC 4 Today). Here, as elsewhere, he was underlining the thoroughly British character of Gibraltar and its inhabitants. The profound Britishness of the place appears as one of its signal features and Guardian journalist Sam Jones (2018) a few weeks later had no problems in finding a Gibraltarian who explained that âWe are more British than the British.â In fact, many visitors to Gibraltar (including Spaniards and people from the UK) easily note the fact that Gibraltar is âso Britishâ and the UKâs Channel 5 ran a successful three-season reality television programme entitled Britain in the Sun. The programme covered many aspects of life in Gibraltar but there was rarely much more than a hint that anyone could be anything other than thoroughly and resolutely British.
There are the obvious signs of red telephone boxes and bobbies on the beat and one comes across far more images of Her Majesty the Queen in public buildings than anywhere in the UK. But, then again, there are very few red telephone boxes left in the UK and the traditional custodian helmet is certainly not as ubiquitous in the UK as it is on the streets of Gibraltar.1 In some sense Gibraltar is a simulacrum of Britishness which is not to say that people are not passionate about their Britishnessâthey clearly are in many contextsâbut, rather, there is an attachment to visible symbols that are less significant or in disuse in the UK. Many Gibraltarians held to the custom of the afternoon tea (almost to centuryâs end) long after it was no longer common in the UK.
Gibraltarâs Britishness appears to be incontestable and it is, moreover, a place where one can go to imagine a Britain of yesteryear, and Gibraltar receives a steady stream of parliamentarians (often invited by the Gibraltar government) and others who can warm themselves on the faint glow of the embers of Empire.2 MPs such as Jack Lopresti, the Chair of the all-party group on Gibraltar, are fervent defenders of Gibraltarâs interests but, at the same time, passionate advocates of Britain leaving the EU. Given that Gibraltar voted 96% to Remain in the EU this would seem as something of an irony but if one understands at least part of the Brexit momentum to be fuelled by an Imperial nostalgia (Earle 2017) or indeed Empire 2.0 as some Whitehall officials have apparently dubbed the moves of the British government to revitalise their Commonwealth links in a post-Brexit world (Bayliss 2017), then Gibraltar emerges as an obvious icon of Brexit Britishness.
Britishness is, however, not a monolithic concept and is certainly founded on various myths, as any national identity. What is, however, of interest in Britishness is that it is not simply about a British national identity but has historically been claimed by people in various parts of the globe. As Stuart Ward has shown (forthcoming), Britishness is not something that has historically emanated out from Great Britain but has been embraced, challenged, and adapted in those colonies and ex-colonies. Gibraltar is no exception. And even as the phrase âwe are more British than the Britishâ often comes unprompted to the fore in discussing identity with Gibraltarians, a deeper conversation reveals a much more complex and nuanced identity than the phrase would suggest.
There is no doubt that Brexit has had a huge effect on Gibraltarâfrom the night of the referendum when Gibraltar was the first to declare for Remain to Michael Howardâs invocation of the Falklands War in protecting British interests in Gibraltar. The latter prompted the Sun newspaper to send a projection crew to Gibraltar and project various slogans on the north face of the Rock (facing Spain) and reported in its April 4, 2017, edition, which had the front page headline, âUp Yours Senors (sic).â3
The response of the Gibraltarian government was to declare an âexistential crisisâ (Posner 2016) and attempt to broker its own deal with the EU. The frenetic and exhaustive diplomatic activity came to nought and, most significantly, Spain was able to secure a public recognition of the fact that it had a veto on the Brexit negotiations and would use it if the UK tried to negotiate an exception for Gibraltar. At the time of writing (April 2018) it appears that Gibraltar will not be part of the transition arrangements. Although talk of an existential crisis has faded, it is worth considering why the referendum occasioned such consternation in Gibraltar. There are, to be sure, many reasons but Ian Jack (2018) is surely right in saying that âas long as Britain remained in the European Union, questions of empire and identity could be fudged. Brexit changes everything.â To be sure, one of the key things that Brexit changes is the UKâs ability to defend the interests of Gibraltarians against Spanish claims on the Rock. At the very least it cannot do so from within the EU, and Spain is showing every sign of being able to marshal the political resources of the EU to defend its interests when the UK is no longer a member.
Brexit also changes the nature of Britishness and forecloses the possibility of a British European identity which is clearly espoused by many Gibraltarians. Membership of the EU made many things possible: a less conflictive border with Spain; access to EU markets; and an inclusive, cosmopolitan, Britishness. It is this Gibraltarian Britishness that is the focus of this volume and we suggest that Britishness in Gibraltar is not only different to that which one might find in Grimsby, Glasgow, or Gwynedd but that, even if it be true today, it was certainly not always the case that Gibraltarians saw the world âthrough British eyes.â In fact, for much of the lived history of Gibraltarians, there have been profound differences in perspective between native Gibraltarians and UK Britons.
The Bordering on Britishness Project
The Bordering on Britishness project was an ESRC-funded oral history project on Gibraltarian identity in the twentieth century and sought to explore personal accounts and, where possible, to discover the hidden, or at least muted, histories of Gibraltarians.4 Gibraltar and the identity of its people has attracted considerable scholarship (e.g. Archer 2006; Constantine 2009; Jackson 1990; Garcia 1994) but almost all of this history used English language sources and the few oral history accounts have also largely used English as the interviewing language (e.g. Norrie 2003). Grocott and Stockey (2012) are the notable exceptions5 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, offer rather a different view of Gibraltar and its inhabitants (see also Stockey 2009): they suggest there was more commonality and solidarity across the border than English language sources would suggest. Works published by Spanish scholars (e.g. DĂaz MartĂnez 2010; Oda Ăngel 1998; Ponce Alberca 2009, 2010) also have a rather different view of Gibraltarâs history, again stressing continuity across the border as well as distinctions (and cite English as well as Spanish sources).
All of our interviewers were bilingual in at least two languages and left the choice of the interview language up to the interviewee.6 This is due to the fact that in Gibraltar Spanish was the dominant language of home, social life, and commerce up to the end of the twentieth century and many older residents have Spanish as their mother tongue even if they are also fluent in English. English for much of the twentieth century was the formal and official language of Gibraltar and Spanish the familiar one, and one of the hypotheses of the project was that this difference in register would affect the tone and content of an interview.
Many of the interviewees became more animated and more expressive when moving from English to Spanish with a concomitant change of tone and language referencing identity and relationships with Spanishness. The most dramatic example of this was a man in his 60s who spoke accentless received pronunciation English (he had been educated in an English boarding school) and who spoke quite formally about his life and identity when speaking in English. As the interview progressed, I prompted him to switch to Spanish and there was not only a transformation in tone but a physical one as well: his body language changed entirely and his, almost clinical, descriptions of his childhood expressed in English changed to one with considerably emotional content and sentimentality as he remembered his fatherâs chauffeur, domestic servants, and family in Spain. On some occasions, he was talking about the same events, the same relationships, but one would never have guessed it was the same person speaking.
The project produced a substantial body of data, some of which was presented at the final conference in Gibraltar in February 2017 by the contributors to this volume, three of whom (Canessa, MartĂnez, and Orsini) were researchers on the Bordering on Britishness project. The volume we present here challenges much of the received wisdom about Gibraltarian Britishness and seeks to interrogate assumptions evident in the British and international media about Gibraltar, as well as much published scholarship. Much of these discussions and representations in the British press and the reported words of politicians in the UK and Gibraltar rest on the clear premise of the indisputable Britishness of Gibraltar and its citizens. The conflation of one and the other, that is, the Britishness of its civilian population as well as the territory, is not as clear cut as much discourse might suppose. The oft-repeated phrase âWe have been British since 1704â points to an undisputed historical factâthe capturing of Gibraltar by Anglo-Dutch forces in the War of Spanish Successionâbut elides the equably undisputed historical fact that Gibraltarâs civilian population overwhelmingly had its origins in Genoa and Morocco for much of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century by large numbers of Spaniards and Maltese and through the first half of the twentieth Century by Spanish (mostly women) people and people from India. Having a largely immigrant population does not ipso facto make the population un-Bri...